Before the Chair of Jupiter

On November 8, Elisheva and I went to Einstein and were seated in the
living room. When one enters his house, proceeding through the narrow
hall, the living room is to the left; directly ahead is a steep staircase
leading to the second floor: on the second floor there is a room with
a large window toward the backyard, with a low table, books, chairs, and
next to it to the right another room, also lined with books. In a little
while Einstein came from the upper floor to us, his long hair well-groomed,
his face lighted up with his friendly smile. He started to move a chair
with a straight high upholstered back, which had already drawn my attention
in the modestly furnished room, and as I helped him, a help he graciously
accepted, he said, this is my Jupiter chair. During our conversation
I took this lead and remarked that if one evening I should stop every
passing student and professor on the campus and should ask which of the
stars was Jupiter, it is possible that not even one would be able to point
to the planet. How is it, then, that Jupiter was the highest deity in
Rome, and likewise Zeus in Greece, Marduk in Babylonia, Amon in Egypt,
and Mazda in Persia? All of them represented the planet Jupiter. I asked
Einstein if he knew why this planet was worshipped by the peoples of antiquity
and its name was in the mouth of everyone? Its movement is not spectacular;
once in twelve years it circles the sky. It is a brilliant planet, but
it does not dominate the heavens. Apollo, the sunthe dispenser of
light and warmthwas only a secondary deity. After inquiring and
hearing from me again that Marduk was the Babylonian name of the planet
Jupiter and Mazda its Persian name, he expressed his wonder. Then I told
him that in the Iliad it is said that Zeus can pull all the other
planetary gods together, the Earth included, with his chain, being stronger
than all of them together; and that an old commentary (by Eustatius, a
Byzantine scholar) states that this means that the planet Jupiter is stronger
in its pull than all the other planets combined, the Earth included. Einstein
admitted that it was really very strange that the ancients should have
known this.

When, after three quarters of an hour, during which we were served tea,
we rose to go, Einstein kept us, saying, We have only started.
In order not to appear a bore, or a fanatic of one idea, I repeatedly
changed the theme of conversation, as was so easy with Eistein, whose
associations were rich and whose interests were many; the conversation
was vivid. We spoke again of the problem of time, which apparently occupied
his mind then, and of coincidence and accident. He observed that it was
an accident of unusual rarity that his chair should occupy its very position
in space, but that it was no accident that we two were sitting together,
because meshugoim are attracted to one anotherand he laughed
heartily and loudly. Meshuga is a Hebrew word, and it means the
possessed ; in the Jewish-German parlance it is often heard, and
it means crazy, in both senses (like the English word), more
often in its milder meaning. Thus he likened me to himself. On this occasion,
and several times more at other occasions, he liked to stress that each
one of us is entirely alone in his scientific standing. This was also
said to heighten my spiritwas he not lonely, too? Of course, there
was an enormous difference in our positions in the scientific community
and in the attitude of the scientific world toward usbeyond comparison.
I took up the problem of coincidences to illustrate it by several examples.

The authors of the Declaration of Independence were Adams and Jefferson,
who subsequently became the second and the third presidents of the United
States. They both died on the same day, and it was the fiftieth anniversary
of the Declaration of Independence. What is the statistical chance of
this coincidence of three dates? Or if a schoolboy or a man in the street
should be asked to select the greatest statesman of the nineteenth century,
and the greatest scientist of that century, he would most probably select
Abraham Lincoln and Charles Darwin: both were born on the same day, February
12, 1809. Or similarly the two greatest writers of their age, Miguel Cervantes
and William Shakespeare, died on the same day, April 23, 1616.

I mentioned these instances to illustrate the idea that coincidence sometimes
bears the mark of the miraculous, and sometimes the explaining away of
telepathy is stranger than telepathy itself, for which I offered a naturalistic
explanation in my paper on The Physical Existence of the World of
Thought.

Before we left, Einstein told us of his dream of the night before. This
dream impressed him strongly and he recounted it it with a voice of unusual
warmth and passion, expecting that I would interpret it. He also related
a dream he had had many years ago about an old colleague whom he had not
liked, and he told the story in detail. The old dreams explanation
he already knew. I felt regret in having to disappoint him, but in accordance
with standard psychoanalytic procedure I offered no clues to the understanding
of the dream of the night before, especially since my wife, Miss Dukas,
and Margot were present, though I could closely guess its meaning.